Arm confirms Exynos 2600 will support SME2 at launch

Samsung’s shiny new Exynos 2600 SoC is slated to debut alongside the Galaxy S26 series on February 25. Previous leaks hinted it would trade blows with, and in some instances, outperform its arch rival- Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy. Arm has now officially confirmed that the Exynos 2600 will support SME2 (scalable matrix extensions), thereby giving us some insights into its hardware. Arm claims it will speed up AI-powered applications such as object detection by up to 70%.

To recall, Arm showed off SME2 alongside its new Lumex C1-Ultra, Lumex C1-Premium, Lumex C1-Pro and Lumex C1-Nano CPU cores. Therefore, the Exynos 2600 will definitely use a mix of said cores. Multiple Geekbench listings showed a 10-core CPU—and, if previous Exynos chips are anything to go by, it will feature one Lumex C1-Ultra core, three Lumex C1-Premium cores, and six Lumex C1-Nano cores. Arm’s Stefan Rosinger further sets this theory in stone with the following statement:

As on-device AI becomes central to the mobile experience, efficiency and responsiveness are increasingly critical. Built on Arm compute subsystems with SME2-enabled C1-Ultra and C1-Pro, Exynos 2600 leverages SME2 to expand the potential of CPU-based AI, reducing the latency associated with offloading to discrete accelerators and making it well suited for short, interactive, and real-time AI workloads

At the risk of taking the statement too literally, it mentions only the C1-Ultra and C1-Pro by name, tacitly implying the Exynos 2600 might only use a mix of them—not entirely implausible because Lumex C1-Premium cores might drive up the already-limited thermal budget. Samsung will err on the side of caution here because the Exynos 2600’s success determines the future of Samsung Foundry’s SF2 node and its ability to attract OEMs like Qualcomm and Nvidia.